Introducing Thrive Health’s Researcher in Residence Program

Thrive Health is excited to announce the launch of our new Researcher in Residence Program.

This new partnership program brings together students and postdoctoral fellows to collaborate with Thrive Health on short term research projects (3-6 months) that address questions and challenges for digital health.

Regardless of their background, researchers who join us for this program have a common goal: to use technology to improve the delivery of healthcare in Canada. We share this passion with them, and through this program, we hope to foster innovation and develop new, evidence-based features and capabilities for the Thrive Health platform, in combination with the in-house medical expertise we have on staff.

We are excited to introduce our first two Researchers in Residence: Tejas Phaterpekar and Joanna Hong. Tejas will be using his previous work with text mining and natural language processing to determine how digital health platforms can better extract valuable insight from an individual’s health care journey. Joanna’s project focuses on measuring patient experience on the Thrive platform, by evaluating different patient engagement models. Here’s a little bit more background on Tejas and Joanna:

Tejas Phaterpekar is a second-year medical student at the University of British Columbia, with research interests involving pain, addiction, and mental health. His interests in these topics stemmed from the several years spent volunteering with Pain BC. With a prior Master’s degree in data science, he wants to leverage data-driven approaches to improve the healthcare experience for Canadians.

Joanna Heejeong Hong, Ph.D., is a John and Daria Barry postdoctoral fellow at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and is also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. Joanna’s program of research examines how social relationships and psychological characteristics impact people’s physical health and psychological well-being. In addition to basic research, Joanna is committed to translational research and has worked with various organizations (AARP, UnitedHealthcare, IDEO) to build and refine well-being interventions.

Through this program, Thrive Health is building a research community aimed at improving the patient experience through healthcare journeys, and with our platform, we are able to deliver focused analytics around patient engagement that gives us the robust research datasets we need. We are very excited to launch the Researcher in Residence program, and look forward to the insights our partnerships produce.

Programs like Research and Residence aim to support Thrive Health’s focus on creating better clinical workflows and patient care applications. To learn how our research programs enable better care, connect us with us today.